Sessions at SXSW Interactive 2012 about Social Media on Friday 9th March

At the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival, Zopim (www.zopim.com), a leading provider of cloud-based Customer Engagement solutions, will hijack the city of Austin, TX to sow the seeds of customer love.

Leveraging SXSW attendees' infamous love for the fun and wacky, "The Support Grinch", a superbad green monster will be unleashed onto the streets on 9th March 2012. He will terrorize innocent civilians with his unsanitary vocabulary, outrageous hairdo and evil smirk.

Fortunately, his green Achilles' Heel is well-documented - the Support Grinch hates hugs. This SXSW, join hands with thousands of heroes on HugTheGrinch.com to hunt the Grinch down. Snap photographic evidence of your loving heroics, and stand a chance to win great prizes, including the ultimate MacBook Air, sponsored by the customer lovers from Zopim!

Very much like the free hugs movement, our goal is to spread spontaneous fun and happiness at SXSW through this mobile game that we conceived in our spare time over the past two weeks.

Linking back to our business, customer engagement software is only part of the equation for customer happiness. We see our users inject great passion, humor and spontaneity when using Zopim to chat with their customers. This reinforces our belief that true customer joy can only be delivered when people within the organization are truly happy, in line with the values of the Delivering Happiness movement.

About Zopim

Aside from this fun HugTheGrinch side project, our full time job is building amazingly simple customer engagement tools. Our award winning flagship product - Zopim Live Chat - has helped more than 35,000 online businesses wow their customers through real time chat engagement. With Zopim, our customers are happily targeting high-value website visitors, chatting directly with customers, building great relationships and increasing brand equity, everyday.

Social media companions and multiscreen viewing experiences are now as synonymous with premiere, primetime television as your living room couch. However, what does all this multitasking and social engagement mean for the networks promoting shows? Nearly every major network and cable outlet includes at least one social media component to compliment its linear programming, driving engagement with its viewers. But, why? This panel will explore (and hopefully answer) what is the measurement of success in multi-screen viewing. Does social media directly drive ratings? Does social/digital buzz translate to more eyeballs on the screen, or just more critics? We will delve into how social media is driving tune-in and increasing buzz surrounding linear programming. We will look at spikes in viewership associated with spikes in social media and strong SM campaigns through various case studies and examples.

Quick and effective communication may run afoul of traditional Jewish culture for the “The People of the Book.” Consuming information in 140 characters requires true customization of message. Branding a nonprofit in a digital world is a highly effective endeavor, and a new feat for organizations nearly or exceeding a century in age! This panel’s discussion will focus on three key issues:( 1) Targeted Update Messages; (2) Bridging technological gaps between community leaders/communicators and social media experts; and (3) Community Engagement.

As online video consumption increases dramatically, your organization or cause should be developing long-term or campaign-focused strategies for film. Whether you intend to raise awareness or funds, using video efficiently & effectively could be the key to inspiring action.

This panel includes new media pioneer Dorothy Engelman, who specializes in creating content for non-profits & founder of Get Involved, a network for volunteers; Rob Dyer, founder of Skate4Cancer & star of multiple engaging online videos & short docs; & Sherien Barsoum, former social worker & documentarian behind ‘Colour Me’

Higher education isn't known for early adoption of innovation. As an industry, it tends to lag behind. This has been generally true of social media implementation as well. And yet some institutions have been successful at creating social media programs that are strategic, integrated, measurable, innovative, and most important, highly successful. How have they overcome the obstacles? Who made it happen? What changes were required to normal ways of doing business? And what can we all learn from it?

As more and more students take online courses and work multiple jobs to pay for their education, they physically visit campus facilities less often, effectively disengaging them from the institution. As we live more of our lives online, how can we create more opportunities to connect with and engage our students through online networks?

This panel is about the many ways in which modern internet adoption and use mirrors the development of agrarian sharecropping in the South following the Civil War- whereby African Americans provided massive amounts of labor to make other people rich, but could never move beyond basic subsistence living. According to the Pew Internet& American Life Project,as of May 2011, 25% of online African Americans now use Twitter, compared with 9% of such whites. African-American and Latino internet users are each significantly more likely than whites to be Twitter adopters. One out of ten African-American internet users now visit Twitter on a typical day—that is double the rate for Latinos and nearly four times the rate for whites. Pew research has also indicated that Blacks and Latinos are significantly more likely to use mobile devices to text message, use social networking sites, use the internet, watch and record videos, make charitable donation, use email, play games, listen to music, instant message and post multimedia content online. Yet disproportionate consumption of technology among Blacks, does not appear to be translating into wealth building and job creation in a community facing a 16.1 unemployment rate. Techcrunch founder, Michael Arrington caused a minor controversy when CNN’s Soledad O’Brien asked him about Black entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and Arrington replied “I don’t know a single Black entrepreneur.” In 2012, the definition of Digital Divide appears to have shifted from access to technology to how communities of color leverage that technology.

Passion for social issues has been an American ideal from the start. For hundreds of years, foundations and nonprofit organizations have been forming groups to provide support, comfort, and solutions to some of the world’s biggest challenges. Dialogue and subsequent action happens when dedicated people rally together in communities - live or virtual - to impact health issues, advance social causes, and make the world a better place.

With the ever-changing landscape of new digital community-building platforms, these socially responsible groups are taking advantage of new technologies to reach and engage their audiences. The panel will uncover the organizational strategies of community building, maintaining engagement over time, and uniting a group of people who may have never met face-to-face. From helping people quit tobacco to establishing support groups for rare diseases and supporting healthy lifestyles, each organization approaches community engagement in a unique way. Come hear the successes and set backs of community building that strive to bring social issues to the forefront and address them in modern ways.

Mobile social networking apps continue to grow in popularity, a trend that gives emerging technology companies a unique chance to partner with entertainment channels to provide audiences with an enhanced, personalized experience. Key partnerships between entertainment outlets and social apps like GetGlue and GroupMe are important for marketers to increase visibility, reach and engagement with specific audiences. The development of social networking apps give direct access to audiences who opt-in to receive exclusive content, news and special promotions. Panelists will address how audiences and brands are increasing visibility through apps and allowing audiences to transition from being simple “viewers” to actual “users” as they communicate directly with media through evolving social media platforms.

Understanding why social media works the way it does can be traced back to origins well before The Cluetrain Manifesto. I'll take a look into anthropology and the concepts of communal sharing, authority ranking, equality matching, and market pricing to analyze how social media works today. Most importantly, I'll discuss how brands - armed with an understanding of these basic ideas - can activate them in today's social media environment.

World food systems hang in a balance--the latest tech only hints at what’s coming. Consider the future of social tools with us, using a seafood lens. DNA testing, barcode scanning, big data and ubiquitous computing mean we can hack the food system like never before. Corporations have yet to provide consumers with tools to understand the impacts of our food choices. This is a change that we will have to lead. Let’s build it today. The open food system will be social. Disruption from a social food system may be as powerful as social media has been in the media world. We can demassify food like social tools have demassified media. Just as we have increasingly turned to the web to learn about—and influence—world and local events, so too we will turn to an open and social food system, managed online, to learn about and acquire food.

Smokey Bear has been a national icon since 1944 and has had a Twitter icon since 2010. Meet Smokey and the man behind the bear's tweets. While Smokey usually reminds folks that only you can prevent wildfires, in this session he'll help you see how you can build a social media wildfire, responsibly. Learn how staying in character is critical to improving the quality of your connections and interactions and get a better sense of how you can make a legacy brand relevant today. Attendees will walk away with 7 tactics that will revolutionize their communication strategy through social storytelling and create social good through social media at the same time. All attendees will also receive free bear hugs.

Join this fun, interactive core conversation and learn best practices and practical tips for using your social media voice to spark social action in the real world. Whether you care about supporting local schools, raising money for your Cause, or mobilizing your friends and neighbors for a service project or to respond to a community crisis -- this conversation is for you.You'll be working on teams to spark real world action right from the session room at SXSW. There will be fabulous prizes for the winning teams.This session is for anyone interested in being a change agent or standing up for a cause, and for formal and informal service and nonprofit leaders.

Location-based technology has played a significant role in the recent expansion and growth of social media. That role is set to further explode in the coming years. As the leading all-male mobile location-based social network in the world, Grindr has created a global brand that in the past two years has amassed a user base of over 3 million users in 192 countries. The Grindr team hopes to evolve this mobile GPS experience with Blendr – a new location-based mobile app for everyone in the world that lets you discover, meet, and interact with the people around you. This presentation will focus on the future of location-based social networking and how we can make it easier to meet new people around us. Discussion will include issues ranging from the idea behind a start-up to the implementation and development of that idea into a product, to growing a user base and using social media options to create brand awareness and loyalty.